Dear colleagues,

We are pleased to announce the soft launch of the German World War II
Captured Maps Collection, the UC Berkeley Earth Sciences & Map Library's
digitized collection of maps captured from the German military during World
War II. Please explore our library guide that provides context for the
collection and access to the digitized maps:
https://guides.lib.berkeley.edu/germancapturedmaps

From October 1944 to September 1945 U.S. military intelligence acquired
large quantities of German maps in Europe and subsequently shipped them to
an Omaha processing center run by the U.S. Army Map Service (AMS). These
maps proved invaluable to U.S. military planners during the early Cold War
years. By the 1950s, however, the AMS began to deposit these German maps in
research libraries across the United States. The German World War II maps
form important legacy collections in many U.S. map libraries yet remain
largely hidden, under-cataloged and under-studied.

These German maps are important historical source materials. World War II
in many ways radically altered the European landscape: towns and villages
were eradicated, place names were changed, and political boundaries were
redrawn. These maps will allow geographers, social historians and
genealogists to trace families and communities. For researchers studying
the history of science and technology the maps provide a rich trove for
evaluating the German surveying and mapping effort of the first half of the
20th century. The maps also document the many crimes of the Nazi
dictatorship. They served as planning tools for the war of aggression
unleashed by the Nazi regime, allowing it to maintain control over vast
territories and extract resources. Some maps functioned as resource
inventories which allowed Nazi leaders to exploit occupied regions. Census
maps were used to uproot people from their homes and to plan the murder of
countless others, foremost in the Holocaust. These maps are invaluable
sources for historians seeking to understand the Nazi regime and its
horrific crimes.

Our goals for this project were to:

   -

   Scan and publish online the digitized sheets in order to make them more
   broadly available to researchers around the world; and
   -

   Create thoughtful organization for the map sets in our collection in
   order to understand their historical evolution and create corresponding
   richly descriptive cataloging records.

We began this project in the fall of 2017 when we started integrating
deaccessioned German and Japanese captured World War II maps from UC
Riverside into our own existing captured maps holdings (many thanks to
Janet Reyes at UC Riverside). Over the past 3 years we have been working
through the German military maps and have cataloged, scanned, and stored
approximately 10,000 of the estimated more than 21,000 German captured maps
in our collection thus far. The digital collection will continue to grow as
we catalog and scan more maps when we are able to return to campus.

It has truly been a collaborative effort to bring this project together and
it would never have been possible without the steady work of numerous units
throughout the UC Berkeley Library and beyond. We extend our sincere thanks
to:

   -

   Earth Sciences & Map Library staff and student library employees for
   managing logistics and physically processing the maps;
   -

   Library IT for their work managing and digitizing the maps, adding them
   to the digital collections site, and more;
   -

   Northern Regional Library Facility (NRLF) for their work managing the
   retrieval and storage of the maps;
   -

   UC Riverside Library for transferring their collection of captured maps
   to us in monthly map shipments;
   -

   Interlibrary Services for coordinating the shipments with UC Riverside;
   -

   Mail & Transportation Services for making map deliveries between the
   Digital Imaging Lab, NRLF, and the Earth Sciences & Map Library; and
   -

   Library Administration for their support.

We are excited to make this contribution to our collective understanding of
these maps and look forward to the scholarship it will enable.

Sincerely,

Susan Powell & Heiko Mühr
-- 
Susan Powell
GIS & Map Librarian
UC Berkeley
510.643.2684
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pronouns: she/her/hers